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Severe heat costs the Australian economy US$6.2 billion a year

HOT weather has a high price. Heat stress costs the Australian economy US&dollar;6.2 billion a year – showing what other countries might face where global warming is set to make extremely hot days more common.

Kerstin Zander from Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, and colleagues surveyed 1726 employed Australians and found they reported taking an average of 4.4 days a year off work because of heat stress. Also, 70 per cent said that heat had made them less productive on at least one day in the past year, with one-third saying it often did so.

The team calculated that heat-related absenteeism is costing the country US&dollar;845 per citizen per year. Loss of productivity at work costs even more&colon; US&dollar;932 a head (Nature Climate Change, doi.org/4bf).

Together this amounts to roughly 0.4 per cent of Australia’s GDP. That’s greater than the cost for Australia to cut its net carbon emissions to zero by 2050, estimated at as little as 0.1 or 0.2 per cent of its GDP. “The figure is quite conservative,” says Zander; the researchers used lost income due to heat as a proxy for the decline in a person’s economic output, but many people are underpaid for their contribution to the economy, she says.

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Zander says that as the climate warms, the costs of particularly hot days might be greater in cold countries because they’re not used to hot weather. “Australia was already hot, so we are [better] adapted,” she says.

“This study shows heat stress is already responsible for about as much lost productivity as general illnesses,” says Steven Sherwood from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He suspects that as the climate gets warmer under expected climate change scenarios, this will have a significant impact alongside other better-known economic impacts of global warming.

Heat stress is already responsible for about as much lost productivity as general illness